Comparative kinetic study of the non-isothermal thermal curing of bis-GMA/TEGDMA systems

The thermal polymerization kinetics of dimethacrylate monomers was studied by differential calorimetry using non-isothermal experiments. The kinetic analysis compared the following procedures: isoconversional method (model-free method), reduced master curves, the isokinetic relationship (IKR), the invariant kinetic parameters (IKP) method, the Coats-Redfern method and composite integral method I. Although the study focused on the integral methods, we compared them to differential methods. We saw that even relatively complex processes (in which the variations in the kinetic parameters were only slight) can be described reasonably well using a single kinetic model, so long as the mean value of the activation energy is known (E). It is also shown the usefulness of isoconversional kinetic methods, which provide with reliable kinetic information suitable for adequately choosing the kinetic model which best describes the curing process. For the system studied, we obtained the following kinetic triplet: f(alpha)=alpha(0.6)(1-alpha)(2.4), E=120.9 kJ mol(-1) and lnA=38.28 min(-1).